A Remastered game that does not have steam cloud save support.

Stood the test of time graphically, but not exactly gameplay-wise.

The game feels like a graphical tech demo more than anything. It looks visually stunning at times, and it looked marvelous back in 2007, but nowadays you realize that you can’t really make tropical locations look bad.

Overall, Crysis reminds me of Far Cry, and it essentially IS Far Cry, since both of those games were developed by Crytek, which at the time stood its own ground before being acquired by Ubisoft.
Even visually it reminds me of the previous Crytek game: the very same jungle-themed locations, but now they look more realistic, if that makes sense.

CryEngine does still look fascinating, but I do think that the best representation of it is staying somewhere in the 2000s. The next games developed on CryEngine felt... clunky, if anything.

Regarding the game itself and my opinion on it being a technical demo, let's start by talking about the story.

The story is just... there. It is as simple as it could've been: a military-themed story about a war conflict with some aliens of unknown nature, with a kickass nanocostume supersuit involved, which makes you feel like a superhero of some sort. A 2007 teenager's dream.
It seemingly lacks depth: characters get introduced, and then they just either die or vanish from the story completely in a span of minutes.
Voice-acting is lackluster, and don’t even get me started about dubbing. It sounds even worse.
The game doesn't have much depth in terms of lore, too: a lot of unanswered questions and some of the plot twists are flat-out unexplained.

There are sequels, but even those don’t explain half of things that happened in Crysis.
No one remembers those squad members who died in the process of the mission, and remember that our main character called Nomad was there? Yeah, forget about him; you can only enlighten yourself with his fate by reading comics.

The gameplay is... clunky, so to speak.

The shooting mechanics are weird and remind me of games made on Unity; the stealth mechanics are an underdeveloped mess (the Cloak mode doesn't work half the time, you may be detected from 2 km away judging by the Detection Bar, and if you go far enough -- your enemies simply... forget about you); and the animations... yeah, they didn't age well. ESPECIALLY in cut-scenes.

Is the game hard? Yes. But it is hard only due to the fact of how broken and unbalanced the combat system is.
There was some talk about how the Remastered version affected the combat system and made it even more broken, something related to the remaster being based on the game’s console port of 2011. Didn’t dig that deep into that, so yeah, take that part of the review with a grain of salt.

Far Cry was miles better in terms of gameplay.
- The gunplay felt way better, and it had more variety, despite Crysis having more weapons. The former’s weapons all had their advantages and disadvantages; those had individuality, if you will.
In Crysis, though? You don’t feel that you’re playing with a different gun.
- Far Cry had the checkpoint system. If you wanted to replay a specific part of the mission, you could do that by just loading the needed checkpoint. In Crysis [Remastered], you have to replay the mission from the start.
- Far Cry had balanced difficulty. You didn’t have auto-regeneration; you had to carefully consider the tactics you’re going to apply in a gunfight, and the medic kits/armor pickups were limited, which made you feel safe if you had managed to find one of these on your way through the game.
- Enemies had personalities, with each being different in terms of some minor details, which made the game feel more alive.
and so on and on. Keep in mind that Far Cry can be considered a technical demo as much as Crysis.

Also, by the end of the game it kinda falls flat. Narrow environments, confusing objectives (you can literally get lost in that alien hive Nomad gets into or whatever the heck that is) and don’t even get me started on the finale part of the game, where it simply turns into a constant running between point A, point B, and point C.

Would I play it again? Rather not: I disliked the setting, the absence of lore, and the most clunky combat and AI system I’ve ever seen in an FPS game.

Is it worth trying out though? Yes, purely for the “acknowledgment with a classic” type thing. The game has more of a historical purpose: it proved that video games can be something way bigger than just an environment for a very niche audience. Especially at times where people were hungry for the “realism” in every type of media possible.

But I would try out the original version of Crysis. The remaster looks way better visually, but in terms of gameplay it became worse. Much worse.

bad game